Sébastien Launay

  • Canadian permanent resident.
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  • Last update:
    November 9, 2026.

Senior Staff Data Engineer

Based in Vancouver, B.C., fully remote for 7 years.

Passionate technical leader with 20+ years of experience building data platforms that business teams actually use, from ingestion through to the numbers executives decide on. Deeply specialized in consolidating disparate sources into trusted, compliant and self-serve data, then optimizing the pipelines and reporting layered on top.
More than 10 years in the security space, so privacy and client trust are design inputs rather than afterthoughts, and the foundation that makes AI and LLM leverage worth pursuing. Driving force on simplifying architecture and mentoring engineers to deliver high-quality, operationally sound software.

Professional Experience

Since May 2022 Senior Staff Data Engineer at 1Password in Vancouver, Canada
  • Leading the Data Platform team, defining the three year data and infrastructure vision and shifting company culture towards data-informed decision-making and self serve analytics for marketing, finance, product and executives.
  • Driving the consolidation of high-volume data from 42 disparate sources (625 streams) into trusted and accurate insights, cutting time to insight on a new dataset from weeks to a day including ingestion, while ensuring rigorous compliance downstream.
  • Raising data quality through automated testing, data contracts and clear ownership, the foundation trustworthy analytics and AI depend on.
  • Cultivating platform engineering by coaching 4 Senior Data Engineers to master operational excellence with a focus on simplicity and developer experience while providing system resiliency and reliability at scale.
2015 - 2022 Technical Lead - Reporting Data Platform at Cisco in Vancouver, Canada
  • Built and operated a highly available and fault tolerant reporting Data Platform for Cisco Umbrella (cloud security) from collection (37 global DCs) to storage (6 million events/s streamed at peak, 45 TiB per day) and analytics using AWS, continuously optimizing query performance and cost for customer-facing reporting.
  • Mentored engineers on designing simple, secure and efficient streaming data pipelines.
2009 - 2015 Senior Software Engineer at Sierra Wireless in Toulouse, France and Vancouver, Canada
  • Design and implementation of AirVantage™ M2M Cloud Platform features in an international context, starting with a plug and play solution for monitoring industrial control systems.
  • Prototypes design and implementation for the CTO Office.
2005 - 2009 Technical expert, leader and trainer at Anyware Technologies in Toulouse, France
  • Product development, project management, expertise, training and pre-sales on Ametys (CMS and DMS solutions), plus end to end delivery of customer websites and web applications. Design and implementation of a HA web SSO system with load balancing.

Skills

Programming languages
  • Go, Python, Java, SQL, Bash.
Storage and Warehousing
  • Snowflake, Databricks, ClickHouse, Iceberg, S3, Postgres, MySQL, AWS DynamoDB.
Processing
  • dbt, AWS Athena, Polars, Spark, Dagster, Flink, Prefect.
Streaming
  • Kafka (Streams, Connect, Mirroring, Schema Registry), AWS (Kinesis, SQS).
  • Avro, Protobuf.
Infrastructure
  • Terraform, Spacelift, AWS (ECS, Lambda, EC2, SSM, LB, Route53), Docker, Ansible.
AI / LLM
  • Claude Code, MCP, Agentic workflows.
Security
  • TLS/X.509, AWS (KMS, IAM, ACM, PCA), OAuth, SSO (Okta).
  • Privacy by design, SOC 2, FedRAMP.
Software engineering
  • Agile (Lean, Kanban, Scrum, XP), Design Patterns, K.I.S.S., YAGNI, REST.
Tools
  • Neovim, Git, tmux, Github, Jira.
  • Looker, Metabase, Datadog, PagerDuty.
Spoken languages
  • French (native speaker).
  • English (fluent, professional).

Education

2002 - 2005 Engineer/Master's degree from INSA of Toulouse, France in Computer science
2000 - 2002 DUT in Computer science at the I.U.T. A of Toulouse, France

Interests

Hobbies: Open Source contributor, Evidence-based investing and financial independence, Woodworking.
Sports: Mountain Biking, Ski touring, Hiking.